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It’s 1948. The beginning of the Cold War. The post-war relationship between the West and the Soviet Union is just beginning to emerge. The modern era is just beginning and new lives — along with new social norms — are being carved out from the detritus.

Anna Beer and Robert Siedel meet on a train bound for Vienna. They’re returning after some period of exile — Robert from boarding school in Switzerland, young and sheltered; Anna from Paris, world weary with “a cruel upper lip.” His innocence and optimism in a delicate dance with her cynicism.

Canadian writer Dan Vyleta’s first book, Pavel and I, took the writing world by storm and was sold in 13 countries, translated into eight languages. His second novel, The Quiet Twin was shortlisted for the Rogers Writers Trust Fiction Prize. In it the main character, psychologist Anton Beer helped personify the paranoia in pre-war Vienna.

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In The Crooked Maid, Vyleta reintroduces Beer, but we never see him. He’s a ghost — yet he is seminal to the action, helping to propel forward the complex, engaging plot. Perhaps he’s the strange man wandering the streets of Vienna in a red scarf. Perhaps he’s been brutally murdered, found wearing a beautiful, hand-blown glass eye. He may still be in a Russian prison camp, but that’s unlikely.

Anna has come back to find him. She’d originally left him before the war after finding him with his gay lover. She wants him back. The crooked maid, too — a girl named Eva, described as both beautiful and broken — wants to see him. He looked after her for a while when her parents disappeared and she wants to recapture the feeling of security, feeling cared for and loved.

In the mix are Karel, the giant Czech, ostensibly Beer’s prison-mate during the war; the Siedel family, whose riches were gained by a deal with a Jewish man who had to sell his factor; and the murder trial of Wolfgang Siedel, accused of killing he and Robert’s father.

These characters embody symbolically modern issues of atonement, reparation, homosexuality, fidelity and addiction. Eva, in particular, represents an innocence that was broken and somehow tries to balance caution and cynicism with hope.

That’s no accident. Vyleta’s The Crooked Maid is an exploration of morality, with the characters weaving complex relationships that push the boundaries of what is acceptable. There’s a grey zone after the war where everything has changed but social norms have yet to catch up. There’s no better time to explore good and evil, right and wrong, than when so many of our assumptions have been torn apart.

The language evokes the era, with Vyleta’s references coming as much from film as they do from literature. “[S]he . . . dug in her handbag for makeup and mirror, intending to paint new life upon her fading lips.” The description evokes a dark Ingrid Bergman, which is to say it’s highly atmospheric.

There is plenty of literary resonance in the book, too, adding to the rich feast of a read his characters and plot have already given: crows that live in the roof of the misbegotten house, one named Yussuf (the trickster, death, an omen) is a pet of Eva, the crooked maid; a direct reference to Chekhov (“[I]f you introduce a gun in Act One, it has to go off in Act Three. He does not tell us what happens if you introduce it in Act Three.”)

The imagery is perhaps a little heavy handed — do the crows need to make so much noise? Must the red scarf so obviously cut through the grey mood of Vienna?

Still, that’s a minor quibble when we look at how deflty Vyleta raises moral questions — what is a good man? Is being murdered in anger the same as being murdered in war?

At the end of the book comes Vyleta’s most specific pronouncement on war. Back in a prison camp, where a battered man with no name (he’s a “ghost,” a relic from the war, the man with the red scarf, perhaps?) practices taxidermy. His hands are misshapen, nearly broken. Why?

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